Customer Profile: StatoilHydro

StatoilHydro is an integrated technology-based international energy company primarily focused on upstream oil and gas operations. Headquartered in Norway, it’s Scandinavia’s largest retailer of oil products and the world’s largest operator in waters deeper than 100 metres.

AOS and StatoilHydro first collaborated in 2005 with a JACK-based implementation for smarter work process support. Then their Heidrun oil field hosted JACK agents that were assigned to individual oil wells. Each of these “well agents” monitored their well’s state and reported anomalies to a “field agent” that decided what actions should be taken based on multiple well agent reports. The field agent then reported its recommendation(s) to production engineers. This prototype project demonstrated that JACK agents can provide useful decision-support information to engineers based on the agents’ ability to process large amounts of real-time data and compare real-world sensor readings with models.

Further research followed and, today, StatoilHydro is employing JACK in two research projects with a third on the horizon. The SHAPE project (http://www.shape-project.eu) includes an industrial-use case to resolve an operational scheduling problem, linked to production planning and cargo scheduling at StatoilHydro’s Mongstad refinery. The challenge for JACK is to match tanker and cargo at the optimal time to reduce the ship’s lay time, while allowing for production component availability and blending station capacity.

The AutoConRig project (http://www.posccaesar.org/wiki/IOHN/AutoConRig) uses JACK to provide autonomous support for drilling operations in harsh environments. This future project will investigate how JACK can be employed to control erosion from sand that accumulates during production.

Over these past years, our research work with StatoilHydro has broken new ground in several arenas within the petrochemical industry and AOS looks forward to a long and fruitful relationship in the years to come.